When a Monster Plied the West Side

A mounted escort preceding a train on 11th Avenue about 1900. The tracks were replaced by the High Line in the 1930s.Credit
Library of Congress

THOUSANDS of kids are going to find model train sets under the tree on Christmas morning — freight trains, circus trains, Wild West trains, military trains, express trains, commuter trains. ... But one train setup you won’t see is a replica of the street-level freight line that plied the West Side from 1846 to 1941. The line killed and mutilated hundreds of people, and its path well earned the name Death Avenue.

In 1846, what was then the Hudson River Railroad negotiated a charter with the city to run tracks on an irregular route down 10th and 11th Avenues to a freight terminal at Beach and Hudson Streets and then to a final stop at Chambers Street. The trains were sometimes several blocks long, interfering with crossing traffic. Pedestrian deaths along the way were fairly common. The New York Times reported at least one each in 1851, 1852, 1853, 1854 and 1855, describing one victim as “shockingly mangled.”

At some point, trains were required to send a man ahead on horseback waving a red warning flag, at a pace of six miles per hour.

Park Avenue north of Grand Central also had street-level tracks, and people were killed there, too; it was nicknamed Death Avenue first, no later than 1872. Neighborhood residents succeeded in pressing the railroad to sink the tracks. But the protesters on the East Side were brownstone owners; 10th and 11th Avenues were tenement territory.

The New York World referred to the West Side route as Death Avenue in 1892, long after the Park Avenue problem had been solved, saying “many had been sacrificed” to “a monster which has menaced them night and day.” The railroad offered to move the tracks along the river, but that never happened.

Outrage mounted, and two years later Willie Lennon, who had lost a leg to the railroad, lit a bonfire on the tracks as a protest. In 1897 The New York Herald reported that absconding thieves had darted in front of a moving train and taunted the police from the other side before getting away. In the same year, Michael Fox, a watchman stationed at 11th and 40th who had saved many lives over his decades of duty, was killed by engine No. 147 when it proceeded without his signal. The engine had earned a nickname, too: the Butcher.

The death of 7-year-old Seth Low Hascamp in 1908 sparked a protest march by 500 schoolchildren. The Times said he had been “ground to death” at 11th Avenue and 35th, either on his way to school or while playing follow the leader, depending on the account. The Times gave a figure of 198 train deaths in the prior decade, mostly of schoolchildren, mostly in the dark winter months.

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The Bureau of Municipal Research, a private reform organization, said in a report issued in 1908 that over 56 years, 436 people had been killed on the line. The time was ripening for a full-scale attack on the railroad. The city began refusing to accept the annual license fee. But the railroad fought back, saying it carried three million tons of food into New York annually, and that the term Death Avenue was a “malicious piece of sensationalism.”

But it was hardly in a good position, with accidents like the one in 1911 in which 5-year-old John Murray slipped on a wet flagstone and was decapitated. So the railroad offered to spend $65 million to elevate the tracks — in exchange for a perpetual franchise from the city. The proposal failed.

The Board of Coroners reported that Death Avenue was unfairly singled out as a source of fatalities, citing figures for the previous five years showing that 3,413 people had been killed in building falls, 401 by streetcars, 202 by automobiles and 149 on the Death Avenue route.

For unexplained reasons deaths declined after 1900, sometimes to none per year. So perhaps it was traffic volume, not the death toll, that produced the real pressure to eliminate the street-level tracks. In 1929 agreement was reached to build an elevated system, what is now the High Line. A year later, Mayor Jimmy Walker pried out the first spike at 11th Avenue and 60th Street, but it took years to close all the tracks.

Some flavor of the old in-street route shows up in the 1938 film “King of the Newsboys,” which stars Lew Ayres and is posted on YouTube. Take a look — there’s a few minutes of Ayres on horseback with an engine at his heels, waving his flag, calling to guys hanging out in front of a poolroom and stopping to talk to his girl, who is hanging laundry on a fire escape. To please her, he quits the locomotive escort business, goes into newspapers and gets rich.

He was prescient: in 1941, train service finally ended. The New York Herald Tribune reported that the last horse to make the trip was Cyclone, ridden by George Hayden, who wore a 10-gallon hat for the occasion. Death Avenue, after a century, was dead.